In a nutshell, the U.S. economy is technically expanding, but only in the way a patient “improves” by blinking—too weak to hire, too sticky on inflation to cut rates, and just strong enough to keep policymakers congratulating themselves.

To end a week that felt like a geopolitical marathon run in flip-flops, U.S. consumer sentiment staged a modest comeback, climbing to a five-month high in January as Americans collectively decided things are not getting worse fast enough to panic today. The University of Michigan’s index jumped to 56.4, its biggest monthly gain since June, with optimism spreading across incomes, ages, education levels, and political tribes—suggesting hope is once again bipartisan.

Tariffs, once a favorite dinner-table anxiety, have quietly exited the chat for five straight months, while inflation expectations cooled just enough to let consumers breathe without actually relaxing. That said, sentiment remains more than 20% below last year’s level, because high prices, fragile purchasing power, and whispers of labor-market softening still loom in the background like unpaid bills on the kitchen counter. Consumers expect prices to rise 4% over the next year and 3.3% longer term—hardly a victory lap—but spending continues anyway, helped by improved buying conditions for big-ticket items and the seasonal placebo effect of tax refunds.

In a nutshell, U.S. consumers feel better than they did a month ago, but beneath the optimism lies the familiar reality of high prices, fragile purchasing power, and confidence doing most of the heavy lifting.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 Natural gas’s “told-you-so” moment is here: physics wins, geopolitics adapts, and power will get cheaper. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-natural-gas-moment

Freshly returned from the capital of globalism—where he delivered a masterclass on the sacred Don Roe Doctrine—Donald Copperfield unveiled what may go down as the most inspired act of his first White House year. On January 23, the United States formally exited the ‘World Holocaust Organization’, better known in Newspeak as the WHO—proving once again that in an age of perpetual emergencies, the boldest move is to unplug from the Ministry of Health, where ignorance is strength and vaccine is heresy.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-officially-exits-world-health-organization-accusing-agency/story?id=129455089

This marked another textbook inflection point in the post-WWII order: the moment when a nation remembers it has a spine and a supranational institution remembers it was never elected. Born in 1948 as part of the Bretton Woods dreamscape, the WHO spent 76 years evolving from coordination forum to self-appointed Ministry of Health, generously funded by the U.S. to the tune of roughly $1.3 billion a year. The relationship predictably soured on schedule—first withdrawal in 2020, reversal in 2021, and the sequel in January 2025—right on cue with the cycle of globalism giving way to sovereignty. Along the way came the COVID moment, when a “call to action” morphed into permanent emergency, war metaphors replaced science, and “flatten the curve” justified policies that flattened everything else. In true Orwellian fashion, coordination became control, caution became compulsion, and questioning was rebranded as heresy—until, inevitably, the plug was pulled.

What we are witnessing follows a well-worn historical script: nations reclaim authority when international institutions drift from technical coordination into political power. The WHO’s COVID response—marked by credibility erosion, and ambitions for expanded emergency authority—triggered a crisis of trust the institution never recovered from. For the U.S., disproportionate funding with equal voting power, praise for China amid evident early failures, and proposed treaty provisions resembling rule by unelected health commissars made withdrawal inevitable. The financial hit to the WHO will be meaningful, pushing it closer to Chinese and European influence, while America’s budgetary “savings” are symbolic rather than material. The result is a fractured global health order: regional bodies rise, influence blocs harden, and centralized governance gives way to redundancy and decentralization—less elegant on paper, perhaps, but far more resilient when reality refuses to follow the script.

The WHO withdrawal fits a familiar late-empire pattern: institutions built to solve problems quietly evolve into self-licking bureaucracies that mistake permanence for purpose. From the UN to NATO and other trade bodies, credibility erodes once coordination morphs into politics, and the next years are shaping up as a global season of sovereignty—Brexit echoes, nationalist governments, and growing allergy to one-size-fits-all global rules. America’s exit signals a pivot from post-war multilateralism toward bilateral deals and domestic capacity, driven less by isolationism than by resistance to unelected, mandate-creeping authority. The result will either be radical reform or a WHO rebranded as a soft-power annex for others; neither flatters its founding mission. History says cooperation won’t vanish—only reboot.

The question is whether the next version delivers resilience or just more committees, more titles, and fewer answers, all while reminding us that in modern global governance, credentials are optional, accountability is negotiable, and “health coordination” can sound suspiciously like Ministry of Wellness.

Many academics still treat society with thinly veiled contempt—the “great unwashed” unworthy of serious consideration—missing the inconvenient fact that innovation only emerges from freedom of thought, not centralized wisdom. Convinced of their intellectual superiority, they see little reason to engage with those who actually build, fix, and create. Julian Huxley made this mindset explicit at UNESCO’s founding, dismissing “unrestricted individualism” as an error and reducing the individual to a rounding error in history—an early blueprint for a worldview where people exist to serve systems, not the other way around.

Listen to a summary of The Macro Butler weekly newsletter via podcast on Substack; YouTube; Rumble & TikTok.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-natural-gas-moment-podcast

As the global elite packs up from its annual self-congratulatory retreat—having once again declared the economy “robust” between canapés and panels—reality taps politely on the shoulder. BlackRock, long the unofficial mascot of the ‘World Entertainment Forum’, just admitted that one of its private credit vehicles needs a roughly 19% haircut, thanks to a parade of troubled loans. Its middle-market lending BDC is repricing net asset value from $8.71 to barely above $7, weighed down by busted e-commerce roll-ups and a home improvement firm that opted for bankruptcy instead of the growth narrative.

Management even waived part of its fees—always a subtle sign that everything is absolutely fine. Meanwhile, investors are rediscovering that private credit is not immune to cycles, gravity, or bad underwriting, no matter how confident the Davos slides looked.

For scale, this paragon of private-credit sophistication clocks in at roughly $497 million in market cap—small enough to trip over the cycle it was supposed to master. BlackRock TCP became part of the empire after the 2018 Tennenbaum acquisition and now sits neatly inside BlackRock’s private credit “offering,” just as BlackRock splurged $12 billion on HPS Investment Partners to double down on private markets.

In a nutshell, while the marketing machine talks scale, permanence, and institutional genius, one of the flagship vehicles is busy marking itself down and reminding investors that leverage plus optimism still obeys the business cycle—no matter how many billions you spend buying credibility.

The Malthusian crowd, forever hunting for new ways to roll out their Keynesian misery, has apparently discovered the ultimate control lever: water. The WEF—fresh from declaring itself the curator of reality—has crowned 2026 “the year of water,” helpfully signaling that blue is the new green and that life’s most basic necessity is next on the list for central planning, pricing, and moral lectures. Under the banner of a looming “water crisis,” Davos has elevated oceans and freshwater to top billing, complete with shiny initiatives and yet another UN Water Conference—because nothing says abundance like global committees preparing to manage scarcity.


https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/what-is-blue-davos-everything-you-need-to-know/

Apparently the next frontier of “saving humanity” is water management by committee. The globalist playbook now reads: map every river, meter every tap, decide who drinks too much, and call it “science.” Enter the blue economy, a glossy rebrand where rising water temperatures become the excuse to centralize control of a life essential. Conveniently, this push is championed by Peter Brabeck-Letmathe—longtime Nestlé boss, World Bank water czar, and proud critic of the “extreme” idea that water should be a human right. His vision is simple: you get 50–100 liters for survival, while corporations extract groundwater for free, bottle it, and sell it back at a markup. Communities run dry, plastic piles up, and Davos applauds the efficiency. Green was yesterday’s virtue signal—blue is where the real power flows.



https://youtu.be/TPY64EJcsG4

What better way to “save the planet” than by putting a meter on your tap? With climate doom losing its punch, the WEF has apparently discovered a more relatable lever: water. Climate change is “abstract,” they admit—thirst isn’t. So water gets rebranded as the new common good, neatly quantified, priced, and traded, all in the name of sustainability. Independent farming and gardening? Too messy. Markets for water? Already here—air futures can’t be far behind. Unelected committees will kindly decide what counts as “essential” usage, while agriculture gets reclassified as an economic problem to be priced into submission. Control the water, control the food, and call it progress.



https://x.com/heliodown/status/1902832190855188675?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1902832190855188675%7Ctwgr%5E2d6aa9118ad6a802f014c5d288d083b7a71a7d97%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.armstrongeconomics.com%2Fworld-news%2Fclimate%2Fthe-year-of-water-blue-initiatives-to-replace-green%2F

The globalists have spent decades perfecting the art of turning water into a profit center, and they are refreshingly candid about it. CO₂ is too vague, water is the real emergency. First convince governments there’s a crisis, then heroically invite the private sector to “fix” it. Agenda 2030 didn’t retire with Dark Vader Schwab; it just got a new CEO and a sharper focus.

Faithful to the ancestral Don Roe Doctrine, Tariff Man once again took to Truth Social, threatening to jack up tariffs on South Korean goods from 15% to 25% after Seoul failed—shockingly—to codify a trade deal that required investing hundreds of billions it doesn’t have. Autos, lumber, pharma, and basically anything that moves would be hit, though memory chips may get a temporary pardon since they’re already priced like rare gemstones. If this actually lands, expect some indigestion in South Korea’s export champions—Hyundai alone shipped 1.1 million vehicles to the U.S. in 2024—another reminder that trade policy is now written in caps lock and enforced by tariff tweets.